


Guns and Nightmares

by Capricorn_Stark



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bucky Barnes Has PTSD, Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Captain America: The Winter Soldier, F/M, HYDRA Trash Party, Marvel Cinematic Universe - Freeform, Marvel Universe, Post-HYDRA Reveal, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, SHIELD, Slow Burn, Steve Rogers is Not Hydra, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, probably lmao, winter solider reader, you're a winter soldier
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-16 06:48:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29328045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Capricorn_Stark/pseuds/Capricorn_Stark
Summary: You are a former Winter Solider struggling to adapt to a new world after being recovered from the ice chambers by SHIELD nearly fifty years later. You're the only surviving soldier you know of, but after getting news of Bucky's reappearance, you find him and begin to reconnect.Or: Two damaged people try to help each other heal.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Reader, Steve Rogers/Reader
Kudos: 17





	1. Chapter 1

The cold metal of the gun offered comfort. 

It was strange to think about. The concept of "control" had always been complicated for you. The parts of your life before you left the ice, the parts you could still barely remember, had given you no control, no will of your own. There had been nothing you could do without interference from people who wanted to use you, to hurt you, to turn you into a weapon. 

The thing in your hands was a goddamn weapon itself, and yet, hearing the safety click on and off was still strangely comforting. It felt like a reminder that you were the one holding it, you were the one making it do what you wanted. No one was forcing it into your hands. No one was going to force you to do anything with it. 

You were in control. 

More often than not, you would wake up in the middle of the night and reach for that gun. It was hard to sleep when you were plagued with nightmares that felt like fucked up memories you couldn't quite recall, memories that didn't even feel like yours. Every night, you heard the screams of people who suffered at your hands. Nameless, faceless people, begging for you to stop, to let them go, only for you to watch your own hands reach up for a gun against your own conscience, cutting off the noise with one jerk of the trigger. 

It wasn't you. You never stopped trying to convince yourself it wasn't you. But you didn't have to think for long to know that it was. 

In your dreams, your ledger was stained red. When you woke up, your hands were always the same shade. 

~*~

One year had passed since you woke up in another time period. One year had passed since you found out that HYDRA was nothing more than a cursed relic of the past, that everyone you could have known was dead or scattered, that while every soldier like you had been exterminated and by some wicked twist of fate, you were left alive. 

Somehow, you woke up in an ice chamber nearly fifty years later, the sole survivor of what should've been a massacre of mind-controlled soldiers. They found six chambers, five occupied by corpses and one with a woman who was barely breathing. They broke you out, they took you back to a place called SHIELD, and they promised you a new life. They rehabilitated you--they tried to. They introduced you to a new world that had surpassed your wildest imaginations, a world you could no longer even recognize. You were still processing what felt like yesterday, and this world had already moved on without you. 

One year wasn't enough for you to start adjusting to this new world, it wasn't enough for you to stop feeling the weight of your sins, everything you had done. SHIELD's attempts at getting you to disclose information was in vain. You could barely process what you had done in what were the murky waters of your past. You could barely piece anything about your life together yourself. 

For a long time, you thought it was what you got as penance for the horrors you had committed. After giving all your best efforts and having not a single lead, you thought you would be alone in carrying that misery for the rest of your life, forced to bear a tormented conscience on your own. There was no one cursed quite like you, no one alive left to tell the tales you had. No one, until the news broke and you found out you were wrong. There was someone like you after all. 

A man by the name of James Buchanan Barnes. 

And you remembered his name. 

You weren't sure how you did, you weren't sure why - but you knew you remembered his name. He had something to do with you, something to do with your past, and it infuriated you to feel like the reason was right on the tip of your tongue, just out of your reach. 

You knew you had the commonality of being Winter Soldiers - but somehow, you also knew that there was more to it than just that. When SHIELD took you in, they had tried to fix your memories through a variety of strange experiments, none of which had really been effective. Instead of getting back your memories, you ended up getting more and more nightmares about missions and the murders you had apparently committed. 

You knew you had worked with some people at some point, that you had been controlled by a lot of people, and that you had killed even more. But you had no names, no faces. You had flashes and silhouettes of strangers. But a memory of who you were before being a Winter Soldier? Absolutely nothing. 

Despite your best efforts, it was damn near impossible to find anything on your history when you didn't even have a full name to affiliate yourself with. The only thing you woke up with was your supposed first name. You had no memory of parents, siblings, friends, even a pet. Then comes along the name "James Buchanan Barnes" and you actually realize you've heard it before, that you've seen and been with a man by that name. 

That man had some kind of impact on your life and you didn't have the slightest idea what that could be - but you did know that you were damn well about to find out exactly what that was. 

You had to.


	2. Chapter 2

Finding him wasn't the hard part. 

Despite your messed-up memories, you were still able to use some of the skills you retained from your time in HYDRA to track Barnes down until you were standing in front of his apartment door in a matter of mere weeks. The hard part was figuring out if that trip was actually worth the shit you had gone through while you stared the door down like you were expecting it to magically open without you having to knock first. 

What if he wasn't even home? What if this was the wrong apartment? What if he didn't even know who you were? What if his memory's just as trash as yours was? The anxiety-driven questions were absolutely endless, and the only way you managed to keep them at bay was by finally raising your hand and rapping your knuckles against the peeling wood, your body tensing up as you waited. 

One beat of silence, then another, then another. Nothing. You were just about to turn away when you heard the lock on the other side click, followed by the feeble creak of a door opening.

The man standing on the other side looked like he had barely arrived before you had, judging from the heavy jacket he wore and the cap perched atop his tangled brown hair. Neither of you said anything for a while, sizing each other up in silence as the grimy lights lining the hallway flickered. For a moment, you wondered if anyone else even lived around there. The stillness was unbearable. Your gaze flickered away from the questionable stains on the walls and back to him, only to notice that his grey eyes had fixated on your face. 

"Don't think I called room service." It took you a minute to fully let the audacity of his statement sink in, eliciting a blank stare from you. 

"I don't think they offer room service in a place that's about to collapse." He was staring back at you with an equally blank expression, making you wonder if the man was actually joking or not. You were starting to get the feeling that he wasn't. You moved on real fast. "You're James Barnes. I have to talk to you." His grip on the doorknob visibly tightened. You forced your expression to remain neutral and ignore it. You weren't scared of him. But you would keep your guard up. "Look, I don't have a white flag to wave right now. I'm not here for trouble." 

"What do you want?" Despite the edge in his tone, you stood your ground, looking him straight in the eye.

"Information. On me." He was still staring, but you noticed the slightest raise of his brow before his expression was neutral once more. 

"Listen, lady. You got the wrong guy. I don't know what the hell you're talking about." He was already moving to close the door again when your hand shot out to press against it, evoking another questioning look. "What are you-" 

"My name's (y/n)," you interjected, still looking up at him as you held the door open, keeping your voice even and strong. You had an objective, you knew who your target was. And like hell were you about to leave without getting what you needed. "And as far as I can tell, I'm just like you. I know you. I don't know how, but I do." Your eyes flickered across his face, waiting for any sign of recognition. "And I know you know me, too."

And for just a fraction of a second, you saw his gaze waver.

"I already told you," he started, his voice dropping as he took another step back into his apartment. "I don't know you. I don't know what the hell you're here for. You got the wrong guy."

His tone was even and his expression was completely neutral. For a regular person, it would've been incredibly difficult to discern that the man was telling anything but the truth based on his voice and how expertly he controlled his movement. He was believable despite his shady appearance because of the blankness in his face, the resolute look in his eyes, the way he remained so incredibly guarded. He wasn't trying to trigger a reaction from you, you were sure of that. At least, not right then. 

But you were far from a regular person. That much, you knew. And with your eye, it was easy to pick up the little cues from his body language that any untrained person would have missed. Cues he couldn't cover up so quickly because you knew he was trying to conceal that he did, in fact, register who you were. He was lying to your face. 

"I have the right guy." 

Pale grey eyes met yours in a moment of complete, unrelenting silence. You felt your body tense, heart racing as you anticipated his next move and your own. The knives in your sleeves were a precaution. The guns in your holsters were from habit. You didn't want things to go downhill. You knew this man. But if he was dangerous, you would resort to methods you didn't want to use. Despite everything that had happened to you, you still anticipated an attack because it had been drilled into you from a time you couldn't even remember. At the end of the day, you found yourself being exactly what they said you had been trained to be.

A soldier.

His eyes flickered over your face for just a second, grip on the door tightening even more before he finally opened his mouth to say something - right when the glass behind him shattered, a man rolling up with a gun aimed straight at him and shouting _"Freeze!" _before you both found yourselves completely surrounded by heavily armed men with a whole lot of guns.__

__Things were definitely going downhill._ _

You slowly raised your hands as the intruders in bulletproof uniforms branded with the bold white word _"POLIZEI" _continued shouting at you to raise your hands, moving to surround you both. You saw Barnes letting go of the doorknob out of the corner of your eye, slowly raising his hands up as well. His eyes met yours again and it didn't take an hour's worth of analysis to register your next course of actions.__

__You moved to counterattack with the fluidity of a partnership that had worked together for far longer than a mere few seconds._ _

__They had barely registered the flash of your guns when you fired at them, using your momentary distraction to grab hold of the nearest man's wrist and yank it around, using his own weight to pull him forwards before your legs wrapped around his neck and sent him tumbling into another two policemen. You fired another round of shots as another man shouted in Serbian and sent a bullet whizzing past your ear, building up your momentum in a brief sprint before slamming your legs against his chest, letting him crash right into the wall before you sprang up off the ground and knocked out another one with a spinning back kick to the head._ _

__"On your right!" Barnes whipped around right as you took out the man who had managed to sneak up on him, grinning for just a split second before punching another guy in the face and sweeping his legs out from beneath him._ _

__You heard another chorus of screams and looked up just in time to see Barnes raising his hand and blocking a bullet with-_ _

___A metal arm?_ _ _

__You barely had time to register any surprise when you heard a yell from behind you, whirling around right when the unfortunate soul was met with a solid punch to the face with the aforementioned metal arm. You looked up to see Barnes beside you, meeting your gaze for just a second before the man crumpled to the ground and he turned to run towards the window._ _

__"On _your _right."___ _

____You snapped out of whatever that had been, cursing yourself for not being careful as you watched him snatch up a bag and break straight through the glass, tucking and rolling up to another run once he landed one rooftop away. You followed suit, ignoring the stab of pain that shot through your legs at your somewhat reckless landing as you did so._ _ _ _

_____"Barnes!" ____ _ _ _

______A group of special forces raiding his apartment had most certainly not been included in your plan at any point, but that didn't mean you were about to let the guy get away. You had no idea where the hell he'd wind up, or how long it would take for you to find him again, and if you let him go now, you would be kissing your only real, living connection to your past goodbye. So you sprinted after him, nearly catching up as he turned his head to look at you - right when you felt something hit you straight in the back, causing you to topple forwards against the rooftop._ _ _ _ _ _

______You weren't processing pain. All you could feel was your body growing ten times heavier as you tried to push yourself back onto your feet, only to fall right back down as spots danced around your vision like you were being forced into a deep, deep sleep. If this was what dying felt like, you thought it would have been a far less terrifying prospect in the past._ _ _ _ _ _

______The last thing you heard was a gunshot._ _ _ _ _ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/n: Bucky canonically has brown eyes in the comics and the MCU, him having grey eyes is just a headcanon lol


End file.
